Ma Ling/Text
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"In today's era, we have more and more opportunities and ways to meet people, and the Internet has opened a massive door of choices for us, but whether we are entering or continuing to develop a romantic relationship, or To put it more simply, falling in love with someone is becoming more and more difficult. We long for love, but we are afraid of love. Do you feel the same way?" - This is a topic launched on Douban in 2023 ——"Do you feel that love is getting harder and harder?" So far, there have been 871 articles and 1.93 million views. It’s true. In this year, I heard the words “not in love”, “not married” and “infertile” more than any other year. I also heard the words “bird watching” and “city” more than any other year. "Traveling", "spiritual cultivation", "riding", "i person" instead of "e person" have become more popular self-labels, and "No. 600 Wanping South Road", where the Shanghai Mental Health Center is located, has almost become a new cultural holy place.
In the season of falling leaves, I believe there will still be young people who recite Rilke's poems like we did when we were young: "Whoever has no house now does not need to build, and whoever is lonely now will always be lonely." It's just that. Most of us are "fearful of loneliness", while the new generation will declare with some exaggeration that they "enjoy loneliness". They say "I feel tired and don't love you", they say "it's not bad to be alone!"
Therefore, this year's exhibition reading "Cold Intimacy" and "The End of Love" by French sociologist Evaillouz are like meeting the right person at the right time and being pleasantly surprised. Yilos was born in Morocco, North Africa. He moved to France with his parents when he was 10 years old. He studied sociology, literature, and communication. He received a doctorate from the Ann Arbor School of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania in the United States. He currently teaches at the Ecole Supérieure des Sciences Sociales in Paris, France, and at the Greek School of Communication in Israel. The Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Burei University was named one of the eight influential female scholars in global sociological research last year. Her academic background is the Frankfurt School, and she is deeply involved in the intersection of emotional sociology and cultural studies. Since the publication of "Consumption Romantic Utopia: Love and the Cultural Conflict of Capitalism", the research purpose has been revealed, and the subsequent masterpiece "Cold Intimacy: Making Emotional Capitalism" (the Chinese translation title is "Cold Intimacy: Why Love Is Getting Harder and Harder" ), "Why Love Hurts: A Sociological Explanation" and "The End of Love: The Sociology of Negative Relationships" increasingly deepen the criticism of "emotional capitalism".
"Emotional Capitalism" (emotionalcapitalism) is the main thread throughout Yi Luosi's works, which is a description of how capitalism uses emotions, controls emotions, processes and produces emotional goods, thereby gradually chilling intimate relationships and letting people Love comes to an end. Emotional capitalism is a culture in which emotion becomes an entity that can be assessed, examined, discussed, negotiated, quantified, and traded. Economic activities and discursive practices shape each other around emotions. On the one hand, emotions become the top priority of economic behavior. On the other hand, "calculation" and "commodification" increasingly dominate the emotional life of the middle class.
Yi Luosi said: "For more than twenty years, I have been studying how capitalism and the culture of modernity have changed our emotional lives and romantic relationships. The voice of psychology must not be the only voice on this issue. Sociology I have always firmly believed that all kinds of psychological experiences are repeated performances of the drama of collective life, and our subjective experience reflects and extends the social structure." If Yi Luosi's success story is explained in academic jargon, it is a "sociology + communication" The story of scholars taking over the territory of "psychology", of course, was assisted by "cultural studies" and "feminism". "Cold Intimacy" and "The End of Love" can easily be placed in the "psychological self-help" section of bookstores, or misunderstood by ordinary readers as "popular happiness" books. Only after reading the book will you know that the author believes that the psychological industry manages various emotional wounds and psychological rifts caused by capitalism, and that kind of books themselves are emotional commodities produced by "emotional capitalism".Not only that, scumbag men and women, misogyny, cold intimacy, "crush" (referring to short-term infatuation, passionate love), and loose "careless love" are just appearances, causing such serious problems in society. , psychologists have to take a step back, and sociologists have to step forward.
"Cold Intimacy" aims to "draw the general outline of 'emotional capitalism'" and identifies the contemporary manifestation of "emotional capitalism" as "fast food-style emotional consumerism", which advocates efficiency and value maximization even in consumption. The book first uses historical research to explain that when sociology understands "modernity", in addition to many "grand narratives" - surplus value, exploitation, rationalization, disenchantment and division of labor, there are also "minor narratives", that is, "minor narratives". To describe or explain the arrival of modernity in emotional terms.” Yi Luosi pointed out: "Emotion is not action in essence, but the inner energy that drives us to take action. It gives action a specific 'emotion' and 'color'".
"Cold Intimacy: Why Love Is Getting Harder and Harder"
[French] Eva Yilos | Written by
Wang Li | Translated by
Pu Rui Culture | Hunan People's Publishing House
April 2023
Many social arrangements are actually emotions Arrangements, such as the social hierarchical order resulting from gender divisions, contain implicit emotional divisions. Men with character need to show courage, calm rationality and educated enterprising spirit, while women with temperament need to be kind and compassionate. Keep your mind happy. Her view is that "the formation of capitalism went hand in hand with the creation of a highly specialized emotional culture", creating a "healing emotional style" that interweaves the three cultures of psychotherapy, economic productivity and feminism. , solve private mental health, solve corporate employee management, and solve women’s awakening and growth. In the name of "communication," emotions are placed at the center of the social model. However, the strong subjectivity of life and the objectification and standardization of emotional expression have become a set of intractable contradictions.
Secondly, the book "Cold Intimacy" also provides an in-depth analysis of the operating mechanism of emotional capitalism. The author points out that the private self has never been more publicly displayed than it is today, and the modern identity that is publicly displayed on various social networks uses a narrative that combines the desire for self-fulfillment with the assertion of emotional pain. There are subtle echoes of the victim complex, complaint culture, and narcissism. An underappreciated childhood, overly controlling parents, implicit low self-esteem, obsessive-compulsive disorder about work, sex, food, anger, fear and anxiety are both common emotional problems and are treated as "available resources" ”, because overcoming the knot in one’s heart and leading to success is a story that contemporary people like.
Therefore, the trinity of "acknowledgment narrative", "healing narrative" and "success narrative" is a classic example of how Oprah Winfrey got rid of her inferiority complex about her body and moved towards the throne of "Queen of Talk Shows". At the same time, the "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders" has expanded the definition of mental disorder behaviors one edition after another, giving people the impression that "everyone is sick". Psychological self-help clubs, pharmaceutical companies, insurance institutions, media and The country and different actors have jointly created an action field. In this "emotional field", personal emotional life needs to be managed and adjusted. The key is that there are unlimited business opportunities. An individual's emotional ability is regarded as "emotional capital". It also has another more popular name "emotional intelligence" (emotional intelligence). When this concept emerged in the 1990s, it quickly swept the business field. It is not only a personal "social (will)" "Capital" also forms a new emotional hierarchy in the form of evaluation.
In addition, the author is also concerned about the "online dating" phenomenon that is dually sandwiched between consumption and technology. Generally speaking, emotions in romantic love are rooted in the body. Sweaty palms, pounding hearts, blushing cheeks, intertwined fingers, stammering, and tears are all manifestations of the body's deep involvement in emotional experience. . However, the Internet has emptied the body. On the one hand, it allows people to "express" themselves more fully, but on the other hand, there is less "accidental encounter" and "love at first sight".Dating on the Internet can be called a "public psychological performance". This constructed "psychological self" can be understood through texts and images, and can also be "matched" in the digital marriage market through classification, quantification, and superimposed tags. . However, this semi-illusory personal image may be far from the actual self. The supermarket-like selection mechanism makes the weak even more vulnerable, and the universal and highly standardized language also makes "rational" win more. Therefore, "romantic" "became "pseudo-romantic" and "intimacy" became "cold intimacy."
二
If "Cold Intimacy" published in 2007 is still a small book of 140,000 words, "The End of Love" completed in 2018 is a masterpiece of 340,000 words. Yi Luosi keenly captures the pulse of the times in the past ten years and believes that more freedom, more choices, and more convenient media have not brought higher emotional satisfaction, but have made us unwilling to love anymore. She integrates consumer society theory, spectacle society theory, field theory, frame theory, risk society theory, and feminist theory, pointing the finger at liberalism, the capitalist ideology itself.
The subtitle of this book is "The Sociology of Negative Relationships." "Individual choice" as a positive freedom has been the main cultural framework of Western society since the 19th century. People not only have the freedom to enter a relationship, but also have the freedom to exit a relationship at any time. What Yi Luosi hopes to discuss is : Does such a freedom compromise meaningful, binding bonds—especially the bonds of romantic relationships? In her view, the original "contract" metaphor is completely inadequate to describe "the negative structure of contemporary relationships" because diffuse uncertainty and the freedom to exit relationships at will turn the future into a problem. Because there is no mutual trust, negative freedom becomes prevalent, which in layman’s terms means “choosing not to choose”—not pursuing, not rejecting, not intervening, and not being responsible.
"The End of Love: The Sociology of Negative Relationships"
[French] Eva Yilos | Written by
Ye Han | Translated by
Pu Rui Culture | Yuelu Publishing House
October 2023
This kind of negative relationship neither follows the moral script , and rarely incurs social punishment. The only pain it causes is at the personal emotional level. Although it is self-reliant, it will inevitably erode a deep loneliness. The author quotes Fromm's famous line in "Escape from Freedom": "Although freedom brings independence and rationality to people, it also makes him fall into an isolated situation separated from others." Furthermore, under the umbrella of freedom, the essence is the involuntary control of individuals. As James Dusenberry said: “The issues discussed in economics are all about how people make choices; what sociology discusses is People have no choice.” Sometimes, choosing not to choose is because there is no choice.
"The End of Love" not only continues the theme of mutual achievement between emotional capitalism and consumer society, but also has three supplements. The first is the “sexualized body.” "The body is the place where social existence realizes itself." In the operating mechanism of emotional capitalism, the body is seriously sexualized and separated from deep relationships, that is, sex is separated from emotion, and sex is separated from marriage. People withdraw from deep and lasting relationships and enjoy "free sex" that is "disposable" and has two modes of operation: enough partners and replaceable partners. Second is "visual capitalism". The images and stories that make "freedom" a "reality" are organized by the dominant framework of visual capitalism. The visual industry manufactures and disseminates beautiful bodies, arouses the desires of viewers, and then carries out intensive and ubiquitous exploitation around the bodies, thus creating huge surplus value. In the widespread visual performance and visual consumption, capital earns a lot of money. The third is feminism. Negative relationships favor men rather than women. Even in visual capitalism, there is always inequality between the sexes.The author believes that there is an obsessive feminism that equates female power with purchasing power. As women become more economically powerful, they become more and more embedded in the beauty, fashion, makeup, weight loss, sports and leisure industries. , or even "integrating production and marketing", not only consuming emotional goods, but also paying emotional labor.
In short, "The End of Love" stems from the excess of "self" and "freedom" given to individuals by modernity. According to Freud, a major feature of modernity is the huge conflict between the individual's psychological structure and social requirements. He believes that the goal of the soul is health, not success. However, in the current performance society, successful people are mentally healthy. Iroth points out that freedom is a success story, but one that has come at a high price. She does not call for people to return to traditional values or community, nor does she call for the reduction of human freedom. Like all psychotherapy, the important thing is to arouse the patient's "awareness."
Closing the book, I understand that Yi Luosi is like all those cultural left-wing scholars who can see where the disease is, but are unable to lift the scalpel. German scholar Han Bingzhe made a similar judgment in "The Death of Eros". He believed that in the undifferentiated world of neoliberalism, eros dies and routine pornography that can be consumed is prevalent. Love is born from the affirmation of the other and the rejection of the self. In an era of high narcissism, if everyone is cautious and unwilling to engage in it, they will not be able to obtain love. Last year, my "Book of the Year" included Wang Minan's "On Eros", which mentioned that the essence of love is passionate encounter, taking risks, regardless of any customary codes and institutional frameworks. This kind of love exists in classical literature and in past eras. As for whether people can still appreciate such "pure love" in the current era, I don't know.
(The author is a professor at the School of Journalism, Fudan University and a senior book reviewer)
